My new 17-40mm ƒ/4 ultra-wide angle zoom lens was delivered this afternoon, so I tried it out downtown (and on the rib roast I picked up on the way home tonight — we are having standing rib roast instead of turkey for Thanksgiving). The lens is sharp and has good edge to edge detail, even wide open at slow shutter speeds. The photo of Liz in Patrician Designs was shot at 17mm, ƒ/4 at 1/20 sec at ISO 100. Liz is a little soft because she was laughing, but the sharpness and depth-of-field is impressive. I bumped up the ISO to 400 when I photographed Megumi in Cafe Giuseppe (1/30 at ƒ/4). I photographed the mutual life building at ƒ/11 and One Up at ƒ/7.1. The rib roast was a little more work. I used two flashes, one on the camera, the other in my hand. At 17mm, I was about 3 inches from the roast, so I had to use manual focus, hold the camera with one hand, while aiming the flash with the other (I was too lazy to get out a tripod, which would have made doing the photo much easier). The exposure was 1/160 at ƒ/5.6 ISO 400.
Category: architecture
Architecture
Windows
The Duke
When you think of icons and landmarks you can’t get much better than the painting of the Duke in the Frontier Restaurant across from UNM’s new School of Architecture Building on Route 66 in the Duke City. John Wayne stares, from his large portrait hanging on a south wall in the Frontier, straight out north windows at the new Architecture building across Central Ave (Old Route 66). While I was waiting to cross Central on my way to the Frontier, I heard engines roaring and tires squealing and zoomed my lens toward Girard to capture either a car chase or car race on Old Route 66. One of my clients thinks I need to make another edition of my photo book Route 66 Albuquerque’s Central Avenue After Dark and include images like these. He thinks the book is incomplete without a photo of the painting of the Duke in the Frontier and a photo of the School of Architecture Building at night.
Father Justin
We went to a lecture by Father Justin of St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai last night as part of the Medieval Studies lecture series. Father Justin is the Librarian at St. Catherine’s Monastery, which was built by Justinian in the sixth century, and is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world. His talk was on “Continuity and Change at Sinai from the Seventh to the Ninth Century: Insights from a Sinai Palimpsest.” The palimpsest is a page from a set of manuscripts of the Epistles of St. Paul written in Greek with accompanying, parallel Arabic text from the 9th century. The manuscripts were left or forgotten in a room in the monastery where the roof collapsed and buried them. They were discovered in 1975 during renovations to the room. The manuscripts provide a great deal of information about the time when the Christian church in the Middle East was having to deal with the Islamic presence. Using modern photographic and digital technology, Father Justin has been able to not only study the writing that is currently on the manuscripts, but also enhance and make earlier text that had been erased legible so the previous writings can now be analyzed and studied, as well.
As we walked back to the car, I took a few photos of the buildings and features on campus. The architecture and lighting on UNM’s campus provide so many photo opts that I can’t recall setting foot on campus at night within the past four years without taking at least a half a dozen pictures.
Love & Manx
Between nights in the low 20’s and day time temps reaching into the 70’s, the rose bushes have a variety of fresh to freeze dried blooms. Mama Manx was looking in the window hoping one of us would let her in. Laurie made note of how cute she looked, while I photographed her. The kitty was very patient staring through the glass and screen until we finally let her in.
We headed out early this morning, in sub-freezing temperatures, all bundled up, with coffee and Kindles in hand, prepared to brave the line and elements to exercise out right to vote — but there was no line. The poll workers outnumbered the voters, so we ended up spending about as much time saying hi to an old friend attending the vote scanner as we did voting.
Bob’s MAD
Politics! Need I say more? I had to go to Costco before they closed tonight, so I missed the moonrise over the pink Sandias. The moon had risen and only the tail end of the pink was still splashed on the granite along the top of the mountains by the time I could get a shot of it. We have had two nights with lows of 20 degrees F, so most of the flowers we didn’t bring inside got frozen. The flowers in the third photo have been defiant so far, and are still blooming despite the cold nights. I got an old crow flying overhead and then notice a Cooper’s Hawk watching me photograph the crow.
Tunnel Lights
Pieces of ABQ
Old Things
Watermelon Mountain
The first photo shows why the Sandias are the Sandias. I had an interesting day. I accompanied a trio in two services and then played for the outdoor service at 1:00. I have just started playing again after not touching my guitar for over three years and I have not performed in public for almost 10 years. Playing feels strange with numb finger tips, but I haven’t had to go through the pain on raw fingers until they build up calluses. My finger tips are a bit raw from practicing, I just don’t really feel them.
Susan came out for her annual “end of the San Ysidro Church Art Show” visit and trek to the bosque to photograph the Sandias. Although, this year we went out to photograph some of the abandoned adobe houses in Corrales, and then headed north to photograph the Sandias from a different point of view. We got photos of some cranes grazing, playing and fighting in a field along the way, and a hawk just happened to fly by. Just after the sun fell below the horizon, we drove up on the bank of the drainage ditch that runs along the southern edge of the River’s Edge subdivision in Rio Rancho and got the Sandias in their full pink. Another photographer set up his view camera next to us, and then Dennis Chamberlain, who Susan knows, came walking back to his car, tripod over his shoulder in the dusk. So we all talked photography until after dark. Dennis is a fantastic photographer. I recommend checking out his magnificent photos at http://www.dcphotoartistry.com/DC_Photo_Artistry/Welcome.html.



































